“Remote sensing is a rapidly evolving discipline. Its progress is driven by advances in space technology and the increasing demand for up-to-date geospatial information. This demand has in recent years been fuelled by major natural disasters and the predicted consequences of climate change and natural resource shortages. However, an important problem has been that many earth observation satellites have been designed as multi-purpose missions. These missions provided data for a diverse range of applications, yet they often did not serve any of them particularly well. Therefore the trend goes to specialised satellite missions designed to meet the requirements of only one or few applications. This trend is accompanied by a specialisation in algorithm development and intensified efforts in developing interfaces to ingest the remotely sensed data into models.

The retrieval of geospatial data from satellite measurements is a challenging problem due to the confounding influences of the atmosphere and the complexity of the earth’s surface. For a successful retrieval, one ideally employs remote sensing techniques that exhibit a high sensitivity to the parameters and classes of interest, while minimising instrument noise and the perturbing impacts of other variables on the measured signal. Also important is the choice of the retrieval algorithms that must describe the physical and geometric aspects of the measurement process with sufficient detail, yet be simple enough in order to allow a robust inversion of the measurements. Also classification and data fusion techniques must take the characteristics of the remote sensing measurements into account, as they must provide reproducible and transferable results.

These fundamental remote sensing issues are at the heart of ISPRS Commission VII that deals with the thematic processing, modelling and analysis of remotely sensed data. The vision is to make new remotely sensed geospatial datasets available to users, exploiting existing satellite data archives and making best use of new remote sensing capabilities such as provided by new SAR satellites and full-waveform airborne laser scanners.â€